Lesley Thomas > Lesley's Quotes

“The history of Europe before the Conquest is sufficient proof that the Europeans did not have to cross the oceans to find the will to exterminate those standing in their way.”
― Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation

“You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”
― Leon Trotsky

“Globalization is what we in the Third World have for several centuries called colonization.”
― Matt Kennard, The Racket: A Rogue Reporter vs the Masters of the Universe

“When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder. But when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live – forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence – knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains.”
― Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.”
― James Baldwin

“The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”
― David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy

“As Bertrand Russell once noted, among the strongest advocates that the poor should work more are the idle rich, who have never done any.”
― Anne Case, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism

“Being human means throwing your whole life on the scales of destiny when need be, all the while rejoicing in every sunny day and every beautiful cloud.”
― Rosa Luxemburg

“English has spread like an invasive weed, implanting itself in nearly every habitat. It has created a world full of people ready and able to assist English speakers, wherever they may roam. A world almost designed for the convenience of the United States.”
― Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States

“In other words, if you looked up at the end of 1945 and saw a U.S. flag overhead, odds are that you weren’t seeing it because you lived in a state. You were more likely colonized or living in occupied territory.”
― Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States

“We drift from the safe places of our childhood. There is no going back. Like stories, villages and cities are always growing or fading or melding into each other. We are all immigrants from the past, and home lives inside the memory, where we lock it up and pretend it is unchanged.”
― Dina Nayeri, The Ungrateful Refugee

“And here is the biggest lie in the refugee crisis. It isn’t the faulty individual stories. It is the language of disaster often used to describe incoming refugees—deluge or flood or swarm. These words are lies.”
― Dina Nayeri, The Ungrateful Refugee

“The revival of magical beliefs is possible today because it no longer represents a social threat. The mechanization of the body is so constitutive of the individual that, at least in industrialized countries, giving space to the belief in occult forces does not jeopardize the regularity of social behavior. Astrology too can be allowed to return, with the certainty that even the most devoted consumer of astral charts will automatically consult the watch before going to work.”
― Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation

“[V]iolence against women is a key element in this new global war, not only because of the horror it evokes or the messages it sends but because of what women represent in their capacity to keep their communities together and, equally important, to defend noncommercial conceptions of security and wealth.”
― Silvia Federici, Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women

“Cú Chulainn stirred,
Stared on the horses of the sea, and heard
The cars of battle and his own name cried;
And fought with the invulnerable tide.

——Yeats, Cú Chulainn’s Fight with the Sea,
1892”
― YEATS William Butler -

“Today, “psychedelics” seem effectively assimilated into corporate technocracy and crypto-Libertarian neofascism.”
― Daniel Pinchbeck

“The essence of capitalism is to turn nature into commodities and commodities into capital. The live green earth is transformed into dead gold bricks, with luxury items for the few and toxic slag heaps for the many. The glittering mansion overlooks a vast sprawl of shanty towns, wherein a desperate, demoralized humanity is kept in line with drugs, television, and armed force.”
― Michael Parenti, Against Empire

“In ancient times, when the world was cold, prosperous, and flourishing, it was a birthing place for our people. Newly married couples traveled to the cove, spending their first days as husband and wife. It is where love began.”
― Lily H. Tuzroyluke, Sivulliq: Ancestor

“My children tell stories of the ancient world, the old world. They search for Little People on the tundra, little beings not taller than a human hand. They tell stories of strong men who stayed underwater for days. The strong men cupped their hands against the ocean floor, breathing with pockets of air made by their cupped hands. My children try to forget death by telling these old stories. They’ve carried dead bodies to the graveyard with their own youthful hands.”
― Lily H. Tuzroyluke, Sivulliq: Ancestor

“The healers drained our old blood in the arms or back of the knee. They tattooed ancient symbols on our bodies, especially children. Tattoos protect our spirits.”
― Lily H. Tuzroyluke, Sivulliq: Ancestor

“Instead, I think of my husband hunting in the foothills surrounded by fog, walking on tawny rocks and smoky green lichen, like we did in our early days of marriage when we wandered in the country on our dog sled, unrushed, unhurried, filled, and content.”
― Lily H. Tuzroyluke, Sivulliq: Ancestor

“In ancient times, at this shallow cove, the Koyukon attacked our people. The women fought alongside the men, running half-naked from their homes to show their courage. The Elders took the children into their umiaqs, fleeing to the sea. The Elders shielded the children’s eyes but could not shield their ears, and land went silent. The Elders and children buried the Inupiaq and Koyukon people side-by-side on the stilts of the whalebone, then they journeyed north to begin again.”
― Lily H. Tuzroyluke, Sivulliq: Ancestor

“On an idyllic summer day, we walked through the meadows and hillsides, sitting in circles, laughing and filling sacks of cottongrass, salmonberries, crowberries, cranberries, mountain alder, northern golden rod, and rose hip roots. We collected cloudberry tea and Labrador tea, and wild celery. The Elders walked together, laughing, talking of the old days when they would travel to the Messenger Feasts, across the channel to Siberia, or south to trade in Qikiqtaġruk. We’d mix a dessert of fresh berries and lard, whipping and whipping the lard until fluffy.”
― Lily H. Tuzroyluke, Sivulliq: Ancestor

“Seems that when a woman has too much knowledge or skill, or speaks her mind freely, these Puritans take great offense.”
― Andrea Catalano, The First Witch of Boston

“the easiest way for us to gain happiness is to learn how to want the things we already have.”
― William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

“pay attention to your enemies, for they are the first to discover your mistakes.”
― William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

“By the twentieth century, with true American enthusiasm for the task in hand, corvid colonies were being destroyed by dynamite. That this literal overkill, the use of bombing against birds, doesn’t appear to have made any difference to corvid numbers can only be a comfort to those who might question, in general, the results of disproportionate balances of power.”
― Esther Woolfson, Corvus: A Life With Birds

“In a city it's impossible to forget we live in places raised and built over time itself. The past is underneath our feet. Every day when I leave the house , I may walk over a place where a king killed a wolf in the Royal Forest of Stocket, one of the medieval hunting forests ,where alder and birch , oak and hazel,willow, cherry and aspen grew. The living trees were cut down , their wood used to fuel the city's growth , it's trade, it's life.The ancient wood ,preserved in peat, was found underneath the city(The site of the killing is fairly well buried -the wolf and the king had their encounter some time around the early years of the eleventh century)It's the same as in any other city, built up and over and round , ancient woodlands cut down , bogs drained , watercourses altered, a landscape rendered almost untraceable, vanished.Here, there's a history of 8,000 years of habitation , the evidence in excavated fish hooks and fish bone reliquaries, in Bronze Age grave-goods of arrowheads and beakers, what's still under the surface, in revenants and ghosts of gardens , of doo'cots and orchards, of middens and piggeries, plague remains and witch-hunts, of Franciscans and Carmelites, their friaries buried , over-taken by time and stone .This is a stonemasons' city , a city of weavers and gardeners and shipwrights and where I walk , there was once a Maison Dieu, a leper house; there was song schools and sewing schools, correction houses and tollboths, hidden under layers of time, still there”
― Esther Woolfson, Field Notes from a Hidden City: An Urban Nature Diary

“And we might also give thought to the legacy that they have created, by which the people continue to live today. What is this legacy? We often remember ancient or traditional cultures for the monuments they have left behind--the megaliths of Stonehenge, the temples of Bangkok, the pyramids of Teotihuacán, the great ruins of Machu Picchu. People like the Koyukon have created no such monuments, but they have left something that may be unique- greater and more significant as a human achievement. This legacy is the vast land itself, enduring and essentially unchanged despite having supported human life for countless centuries. Koyukon people and their ancestors, bound to a strict code of morality governing their behavior toward nature, have been the land's stewards and caretakers. Only because they have nurtured it so well does this great legacy of land exist today. Here, perhaps, is the greatest wisdom in a world that Raven made.”
― Richard K. Nelson, Make Prayers to the Raven: A Koyukon View of the Northern Forest

“People shouldn't be afraid of their government. Governments should be afraid of their people.”
― Alan Moore, V for Vendetta